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Why not use common aviation subjects to tag questions? Such as:

Aviation Law (LAW)

Air Traffic Management (ATM)

Meteorology (MET)

Navigation (NAV)

Aircraft (ACFT)

Human Factors (HUM)

Equipment and Systems (EQPS)

Professional Environment (PEN)

etc. etc.

I think it would make sense for people browsing through questions to be able to sort them by the common aviation subjects - at least people who already have a relation to aviation. But maybe it would be confusing for people who have little or no knowledge about aviation?

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    $\begingroup$ Where are you getting this list of abbreviations from? Like, why is Human Factors HUM? $\endgroup$ – user13148 Jul 26 '16 at 1:42
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Don't we do that already?

Or, are you suggesting that we create tags like ? If so, I don't see any benefit over the existing tags, especially for non-experts (as you said). And in any case, your tags seem very arbitrary, e.g. I've never seen the abbreviation EQPS before. Is it specific to one regulator or country?

But more generally, we should have tags that are useful and that people use. There's no point in creating tags just because we think that people should use them, we should add them because we need them. If you think there are tags 'missing' that would be helpful, feel free to add them yourself. If others find them helpful and start using them, that's great, but trying to impose a set of tags is unlikely to work.

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    $\begingroup$ The major issues here are non-experts and search engines. The proposed codes make a lot of sense if you know them, like the the Dewey Decimal Classification system for libraries, but if you don't know what the codes mean having a hum tag will just confuse people wondering why you wouldn't just sing on an airplane, and Google wouldn't know what to do with them as search metadata... $\endgroup$ – voretaq7 Jul 19 '16 at 16:17
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    $\begingroup$ @voretaq7 To be fair to the OP, this is more or less what he said in the last sentence of his question. $\endgroup$ – Jay Carr Jul 19 '16 at 19:57
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I see no benefit to the proposed scheme. The only reason for using terse, abbreviated tags is if you're in a context where space is at a premium: there, it would make perfect sense to have a question tagged with a bunch of three-letter codes. But we're not in such a context. We're not a 1980s database.

These tags would be hard for people to understand and hard for search engines to understand. They wouldn't help people but, in fact, they would hinder people as we'd have to add them to every question that was posted. (Even if we just applied them to new questions, I guarantee that almost every question posted would need to be corrected.) Anybody who knows what NAV means can read the word "navigation" just as quickly (adults read familiar words by pattern-matching the whole word, not by parsing the letters individually); anybody who doesn't know what NAV means is hindered by the use of it.

These tags would only work for experts – and, by that, I mean not people with expertise in aviation but people with expertise in our particular site. But, really, our site is pretty simple to use. We shouldn't need a concept of "expertise in Aviation Stack Exchange." If we need that, then the site is getting in its users' way.

This is a scheme with zero benefits and some downsides. We should not implement it.

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